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Standard User Pheasant
(committed) Sun 07-Feb-21 13:22:17
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Re: Is a home fibre network madness?


[re: Pipexer] [link to this post]
 
In reply to a post by Pipexer:
In reply to a post by jabuzzard:
In reply to a post by Pipexer:
Honestly I wouldn't bother - 1Gbps is plenty for many years in the future. It is more robust than fibre and considerably cheaper. I have just run Cat5e in my own house, including damaging walls etc. Fibre never even crossed my mind.

If you have a huge house and you're going to exceed 100m, then fair enough - even then I'd be considering just having 2x100m and a switch in the middle.


I would strongly recommend not running Cat5e. If you have any sort of home NAS then it is not enough in the near future. The marginal additional cost of going to Cat6a cable and future proofing yourself to 10GbE is well worth it, even if you save yourself some money and fit Cat5e face plates which are a lot cheaper than Cat6a ones. It's much easier to swap out the face plates than replace the cable, which will require lifting flooring etc. as opposed to screwing off a faceplate puching down a new module and screwing it back on the wall.

1Gbps is plenty. That is enough to transfer 1TB in under 3 hours. Plenty for streaming and backups. What home use case needs something faster than this?

Conversely I'd argue that 1 Gbps is the bare minimum capability "backbone" you should be installing today. Without considering LAN speeds look at what's happening with Internet access over the past 30 years, its gone from 19.2kbps V.32bis dial-up to 10Gbps XGS-PON. In 1989 you'd be fine running CW1308 all over your house, as its would have been "plenty"...

There are numerous obvious pointers to where things are headed - Terrestrial "broadcast" TV and radio is pretty much dying a long slow death. Everything is moving to on-demand / casting / streaming. Resolutions have moved from PAL/NTSC to HD then 4K now and 8K will be the norm in a few more years. Folks access their data in the cloud. The pandemic has transformed white collar working - more folks will continue to work from home by default, rather than the other way around. The concept of the "office" where everyone comes to work, every day for a lot of industries is now dead.

Not only are there now many gigabit service providers in the UK, we're seeing consumer and small business symmetric *multi-gigabit* offerings from the alt nets like Community Fibre. Its no good have cabling a house supporting 1 Gbps when providers could offer 10 Gbps on a broadband service. It's the wrong way around - the LAN should always be faster than the WAN - or at very least match what the WAN is capable off delivering now or not too far down the track - the whole entire point of putting the capability in now to be able serve you in 10 to 15 years time.

If someone is re-cabling their home then for the marginal 20% uplift in cost specify at least Cat6 standard. Please also don't mix and match Cat5e and Cat6/6A components, that is a terrible idea, just to save a few pennies.

My Broadband Speed Test
Standard User Pheasant
(committed) Sun 07-Feb-21 13:54:23
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Re: Is a home fibre network madness?


[re: ft247] [link to this post]
 
In reply to a post by ft247:
In reply to a post by CarlTSpeak:
The 10G was installed after a home move so that it could be a 'one and done' job


That's exactly why I did it too.

I haven't made use of much of the fibre yet, just a single core out of the ~20 that are run to various locations. The actual fibre cost less than £150 including nice Euromodule based outlets which integrate copper Ethernet, fibre and even coax (as I will be suffering VM until better options arrive this year).

Not having to chase the walls out again is worth far more than £150 to me, and I value the cooler (and by extension, quieter) operation of fibre SFP+s.

If I get bored this week I might even do the energy consumption sums, electricity prices are only going one way.

As part of whole house renovations, I've re-cabled everything using Commscope Cat6A and performance tested it all with a Fluke DSX tester. Do it once do it properly.

For LAN extension, I have a few cores of single-mode fibre that run from my comms cabinet to outside - garden office and my study. We even use fibre for TV distribution - there is also single-mode fibre from the roof which is used to bring FIRS for Sky+/Freeview/FM to the same location - this go to a couple of little dSCR boxes and I push this out using coax internally or patched over to the fibre link to garden office where theres another dSCR transceiver. Perfect TV and radio reception courtesy of fibre.

Sky+/Freeview/FM headend in the enclosure on the right (ODU32 & splice box). Enclosure on left is a separate RFoverFibre application.
https://postimg.cc/68hbGR11

My Broadband Speed Test
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